Baba Yaga. No, not a drunken request for a taxi, but a mythical Russian witch who legend has it swings a combative pestle from a flying mortar before retiring to a forest hut raised from the ground on chicken legs to sink her sharp fangs into the succulent flesh of new born babes. Think the bastard child of Mary Doll and Vlad the Lad.

But the Baba Yaga (Christine Johnston) of the Adelaide-based Windmill Theatre Company’s fabulous production for the Edinburgh International Children’s Festival is an all-singing and all-dancing, ever-hungry but never-boring, riot of colour and noise whose arrival at the repugnantly-named Poultry Park Apartments shakes the snow globe existence of its bored receptionist Vaselina (Shona Reppe) whose transition from grey parka to turquoise sequined shell suit symbolises her transition from wallflower to what director Rosemary Myers described in the post-show Q&A as a woman who “lives to the beat of her own drum”.

The former, sporting a handbag for a hat, is a cross between Patsy Stone from Absolutely Fabulous, Margarita Pracatan from The Clive James Show and Carmen Miranda aka The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat; by contrast, the former is a distant cousin of Dame Edna Everage’s glum-faced sidekick Madge who before her life-changing transformation from silkworm to butterfly is forced by her authoritarian bosses to reprimand the psychedelically-attired tenant for breaking a litany of Thou Shalt Nots: no noise, no pets, no dancing, no laughing, no singing, no parties. In short, no life.

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Sharing many of the themes of Red Bridge Arts’ equally excellent production of Stick By Me which is playing at North Edinburgh Arts (namely, a bored protagonist stuck in a room with nothing to do other than obey a list of parental noes who through play and adventure finds purpose where none should be), Baba Yaga is a surreal romp which would crack a smile on the face of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

Studded with life-affirming proverbs such as “sometimes you’ve got to lose yourself to find yourself” and “you can’t make an omelette without breaking an egg”, and complimented by a cartoonish score by Peter Nelson and Pythonesque animations by Chris Edser, the saga of Baba Yaga will leave you gaga as Vaselina is made to realise that her life is not an insignificant spec of dust in a meaningless world but an entire universe full of endless possibilities.

Peter Callaghan
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